Listen to this episode here.
Today is the launch of Band-Aids & Bullet Holes, my melodramatic action game of bloody revenge. It's a one shot, capsule game, box set, deckbuilder rpg. Check it out.
In honor of BABH, this month on Dice Exploder I'm covering mechanics from other games that inspired it, starting today with the idea of character nonmonogamy. Traditionally in rpgs each player gets one main character. This is often true regardless of whether or not there's a GM: certain characters "belong" to each player. Not so in Band-Aids & Bullet Holes.
But what does that look like? And what does it do to play? There's a lot of games that have played with other models, but to kick things off today we're digging into how it works in Jason Morningstar's Space Post, a game about delivering the mail in space, where main postman and space ship characters are passed around between players.
And to do that I'm joined by Sidney Icarus, game design smarty, designer of Decaying Orbit, and former host of The Hard Move aka the podcast whose format I stole for Dice Exploder. Come on, let's get into it...
Further Reading
Band-Aids & Bullet Holes on Kickstarter
Space Post by Jason Morningstar
Socials
Sidney’s website, YouTube channel, and Bluesky
The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com
Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer.
Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!
Credits
Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.
This episode was edited by Em Acosta.
Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder! Each week we take a tabletop mechanic and fly it a little too close to the sun. My name is Sam Dunnewold, and my cohost today is Sidney Icarus.
Today is the launch of Band-Aids & Bullet Holes, my first standalone print game. It’s a melodramatic action game of bloody revenge. It’s a one shot, capsule game, box set, deckbuilder rpg and you can go back it on Kickstarter right now.
I want you to play this game! It think it’s a riot, many playtesters have told me the same, I just want to share it with you. It’s also the culmination of everything I’ve learned as a designer after three years of interviewing all these smart designers I have on this show every week. If you want to see my taste distilled into a game, if you want to look into the heart and soul of my design sensibilities, go back Band-Aids & Bullet Holes.
And speaking of, boy do I have a lot to say about it’s design. And this month on Dice Exploder, I’m fuckin gonna say it. For the next four episodes I’ll be covering a bunch of mechanics that influenced Band-Aids & Bullet Holes and then diving into how you can see that influence in the final game.
To kick things off today, we’re diving straight into the deep end of the design pool because I want to talk about character nonmonogamy.
A big thing about Band-Aids & Bullet Holes is that there’s no assigned characters. As the designer I basically dump a bunch of stock characters on the table like they’re action figures, and you take turns picking up whichever two you like and banging their heads against each other. This is really unlike most rpgs, where traditionally each player gets one main character as their avatar within the world, and the GM steps up to play everyone and everything else. Even in GMless games like Fiasco or Belonging Outside Belonging games, the typical understanding is that everyone is going to get “their” character and then somehow share responsibility for everything else.
That’s not how it works in Band-Aids & Bullet Holes. Everyone can get their grubby fingers on every character they want, even and especially the protagonist characters.
We talk some today about why I made that choice, but the reason I was COMFORTABLE making it is a little game called Space Post from Jason Morningstar. Space Post is a slice of life game about a mailman and their sentient space ship flying from planet to planet to deliver the mail. It’s what I was playing during lockdown when everyone else was playing Animal Crossing. And in Space Post, every time you get to a new planet, you change up who’s playing the mailman and ship.
And it’s not the only game that fucks around with character non-monogamy like this. There’s also Band of Blades, Bluebeard’s Bride, and host of other games where you have to, as I like to say about Band-Aids & Bullet Holes, share your toys as you play.
To get into all this, I invited on the show Sidney Icarus. I met Sidney a couple years ago at a con where they got in on an early playtest of Band-Aids & Bullet Holes, and I correctly figured they’d have a lot of opinions about it.
But I’ve known of Sidney for much longer than that in large part because they were the second host of The Hard Move, the rpg design podcast whose format I shamelessly show for Dice Exploder! If you want more Dice Exploder but have already consumed the archives, go through the backlog of The Hard Move, too. I can’t recommend it enough.
Sidney’s also a designer themself, particularly of the award winning Decaying Orbit - a for the queen hack about a dying space station - and is still podcasting about rpgs on YouTube as half of Start A Quest!
But today, it’s blood, space, and non-monogamy. Let’s get into it. Thanks to everyone who’s already backed Band-Aids & Bullet Holes on Kickstarter, and here is Sidney Icarus with character non-monogamy in Space Post.
Sidney Icarus, thanks so much for being here.
Sidney: It’s a pleasure to be here, Sam. I love Dice Exploder. I love what you do with this, and it’s just an honor to be a part of it. Thank you.
Sam: It’s a pleasure to finally have on the person whose show format I shamelessly stole when I started my own.
Sidney: Oh yeah, I forgot about this. I think I’m quoted on one of your Kickstarter pages as “I no longer have to do any work because Sam is already making a better version of everything I make.” You really got the sweeter deal there, to be honest.
Sam: My time will come. My time will come when someone else will steal this format and then I won’t have to feel responsible to do it anymore. But what are we talking about today?
Sidney: About two years ago, you and I played a game of yours that’s in development, and a part of that involved a lot of players playing each other’s characters — character sharing and switching. There’s a lot of different words that get used for this. Some people refer to it as character non-monogamy. Some people call it troop play. Some people call it just sharing characters, or a shared role, or split rolling.
Sam: Character fidelity is the thing that I think about. Right, because then it’s like a slider — you can have high fidelity where we’re each only playing one character, and you can have low fidelity where characters are spinning around all over the place.
Sidney: Right. I think of it as character low fidelity — there’s a larger separation between player and character — and character high fidelity, where everyone is playing Joan Cusack.
Sam: I prefer Joan Cusack, but that’s fine. You’re graciously here to help me plug my own fucking game, Band-Aids and Bullet Holes, coming to Kickstarter today. But we wanted to talk about character non-monogamy, whatever we’re calling it here. And we picked a different game in order to do that.
We picked Space Post by Jason Morningstar, which is a 2019 game. It’s published primarily on their Patreon, but you can also get it on itch and DriveThruRPG these days. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about Space Post? What’s the deal?
Sidney: Okay, Space Post is a classic Jason Morningstar game, which means it’s all based around a particular vibe and the fun at the table that comes from just existing in this little loppy space world. The players all share a bunch of different characters, including a space postal agent and their spaceship, the colonists they deliver post to, and the postal workers who sort the mail. But I think the key thing I’d want to draw out about Space Post is that everything is low stakes. There’s a specific rule which says if you can think of a lower stakes, more subtle, more boring way to play — do that.
Sam: That specific mechanic has been on my list of things to cover on Dice Exploder since I started the show. Maybe next year we’ll get to that one. But in the meantime, we’re here to talk about one of the other principles of play. There are five principles of play in Space Post: kindness, non-monogamy, low stakes, travel and familiarity, and role or choose. I don’t need to go through all of those in detail, but they all really push towards what you were saying — this is a low-stakes, kind world in which you are delivering the mail. And it’s in space. Isn’t that lovely?
I played a lot of this game during early COVID lockdown. It felt very much like what I was doing while everyone else was playing Animal Crossing.
Sidney: Yeah, it has that kind of vibe. I think of it as familiar in the same way as Euro Truck Simulator or Space Galaxy Truckers — your dad game. Space Post isn’t trying to deeply simulate the cockpit experience of driving a truck. It’s just about those empty moments in between stops where nothing is happening.
Sam: Yeah. The fruitful void of the game — what it gestures to a couple of times in its text — is that the secret sauce is the fourth time you’re coming back to the same planet to check in on the same people again. It’s a game that’s trying to be about routine, in a lot of ways.
Sidney: Oh, that’s so interesting in the context of what we’re talking about today, because —
Sam: Oh, before you dig into that thought, I want to do a little more setup. Let me read the non-monogamy principle of play, and then I want to talk about how it plays out in practice.
“Principles of play — Non-Monogamy: Anyone can play any character. You will rotate and share the roles of postal agent and spaceship, and can handle everyone else however you want. Maybe you each have a stable of colonists you prefer to play individually for consistency, or maybe you decide who plays who in the moment. Either approach is fine. But the postal agent and spaceship roles need to get passed around — play them broadly and clearly, with their shared nature in mind.”
The format of how this works is: the postal agent and the spaceship fly to a planet, you meet — I think it’s three colonists?
Sidney: Yeah. My understanding is when you land on a planet, the spaceship usually stays up in orbit, so you have the postal agent and then everybody else plays colonists.
Sam: Right. The spaceship and the postal agent arrive at a planet, the postal agent goes out and visits a few colonists — maybe one, two, or three depending on the number of players — and then they get back on the spaceship and fly to the next planet. In that travel time, you do a scene between the postal agent and the spaceship. Then when you arrive at the new planet, the roles rotate — who’s playing the spaceship and who’s playing the postal agent passes around the table. That’s the whole game. You have a route of three different planets, then you go back home to the postal service and loop around again.
Sidney: With as little conflict as possible. And if it sounds thin or underwhelming — yes, that is kind of what’s on the page. But this is written really well, and there are parts that show not only Jason’s skill in game design, but also his skill in communicating a vibe through technical writing. It’s good work.
But if you read it and think “it’s just a game that’s asking me to do the work” — that is what it’s doing. And a large part of it is, as you said, it wants to draw out that sense of low stakes and repetition, and that travel scene where nothing happens, where we don’t really know where the scene’s going or when it ends.
Sam: When I said the word “routine” earlier, your eyes really lit up. I want to hear whatever you were thinking.
Sidney: So your game needs to inject some sort of interest, right? You can have a dragon land — always a super rare green dragon — and that’s where your interest curve comes from. Or you can have characters jump forward in time 20 years. There have to be these little breaks in routine that create the ebbs and flows of joy when you play. What I find really interesting is that Space Post has none of that. No conflict, no stakes, no timer — no feeling that you’ve got to make sure you get this done quickly. Even when the tone of the mail is malicious, it’s in that really mundane way that things can be malicious.
So when we talk about routine — yes, all the elements of play are the same every time. But because every time you see it you see it from a different perspective, by picking up a different character — that’s where the novelty gets injected.
Sam: Yeah, and that’s not the only place for it. You’re coming back to the same planets again and again, but every planet is a little different because maybe someone else is the postal worker this time. The letters people are receiving are different. And this planet is a lava planet while the next is covered in flowers. Those different contexts also rotate around to provide novelty.
Sidney: That’s a fascinating way to approach games that handle mundane subjects — injecting variety through “who are you going to play this time?” That’s an exciting new way of doing things.
Sam: Yeah, it reminds me of that Ursula Le Guin quote about how you don’t have to do stories about conflict — stories can be about other stuff. You still want novelty so you’re not bored, but it’s cool to find other sources of that which aren’t conflict.
Sidney: Yeah. And this is where my first question or challenge on the non-monogamy thing comes out. Space Post gets away with a lot of the problems with shared characters by having no stakes, no conflict. Because if I helped make the spaceship and I love the spaceship and I love who the spaceship is — and then the conflict is pirates about to blow up our spaceship — pulling me as the player away from the responsibility of looking after that character, and then the spaceship gets lost and I don’t get to play the character I love anymore — that’s a real emotional problem at the table. But by having the stakes be something like “the spaceship will always be there, things might have changed, you might have run out of snacks in the mini bar or whatever,” that level of conflict makes it safe to let the spaceship go, knowing it will come back to you in a way you can still enjoy.
Sam: Yeah. I’ve been thinking, as we’ve been approaching recording this episode, about how people really are invested in playing their little guy in roleplaying games. People really feel attachment to their avatar in the fictional world. I think many people — even people who don’t believe this about themselves — experience RPGs by creating a version of themselves. Maybe a sillier version, maybe a less filtered or evil or more kind version, maybe a different-gendered version — but some variation on themselves. And that’s how they pull the levers and interact with play. And when you try to detach people from that, they don’t like it. They really, really don’t like it.
Like, what if I love my spaceship but now I’m giving it up to someone else and they ruin it?
Sidney: I have — and the thing that’s really unique about them is you pick the masks for them. In my mind, Barf has the chicken mask — that rooster mask — and that just is him.
Sam: Oh yeah.
So this isn’t super explicit in the game text, but one particular character — the idea is every character has three calling cards, right? Things like “the stench of spliffs,” “the bloody knuckles,” “the bisexual lighting,” or whatever they have. And one character has a chicken or animal mask that covers their head — it’s like a Hotline Miami reference. It’s not every character, but that one really stuck out to you. You really remember Lockhart, who had an animal head mask on the card when we were playtesting.
And to me, that makes these characters all feel like they already exist. Even as you come in, you get to make up the third calling card. So Barf’s got his stench —
Sidney: Someone had a suit with a briefcase handcuffed to their hand, always.
Sam: Also Lockhart. Yeah. Lockhart came with an animal head mask and a briefcase handcuffed to their wrist, and then you’d fill in the third one. Maybe you’d go with a pet goldfish to undercut the character a little, or maybe you’d go all in with a raspy voice. You get those little fingerprints that you’re putting onto Lockhart.
But you remember Lockhart so strongly from two years ago off of just tiny details — the little bits of poetry on the card. And so that makes it feel like Lockhart is this person already wandering around out there. Like Lockhart is Hamlet: a role in a play, and you’re going to step in. You’ll bring your pet goldfish, your third calling card, your fingerprints to Lockhart when you step up and play them. But by virtue of already existing — having that art, those predefined calling cards — they feel less like your property to begin with. They feel like independent entities that you’re sort of borrowing from the jump.
There’s a metaphor I use in the game text a lot: hey, you’re going to take all these character cards, dump them in the middle of the table like a pile of action figures, and when it’s your turn you pick up your favorite toy and whack it against another toy for a scene, then put it back down. You can still feel like Lockhart or Barf or whoever is your avatar, but it feels like trying on a set of clothes, as opposed to stepping your whole self into —
Sidney: A new character. Yeah. There’s a sense of scale here. If I play a D&D campaign for six years, I spend six years with that character. Me taking on Barf or Lockhart is no less playful — I’m just doing it for 20 minutes instead of for weeks or years.
And I think that’s really beautiful, because to see character low fidelity as “don’t invest in them” or “maintain separation” is not only foolish but really loses some of the beautiful joy of taking on another character. Like wearing another person as a shroud and being fully in that avatar.
Which is why, when I think about the discussion in Band of Blades — we had a sniper that one player had really inhabited, had a big moment with, and everyone became attached to her. One person was really good at doing her French accent, really felt like they captured her essence. We played the entire campaign, got to the second-to-last location, and this sniper had three trauma and a whole bunch of corruption — very much on her way out. The discussion was: we probably need her, but she’s probably going to die. Let’s make sure this person plays her for the final time.
It didn’t quite work out — we ended up splitting up, wanting to get away from that character monogamy thinking of “that’s that person’s character, they should play them on the way out.” So we intentionally stepped back. When we got to the moment of the character finally meeting her end, the person playing her actually turned to the original player and said: “I don’t think I can do this bit. I want to pass her back to you.”
And I have a lot of feelings about that. Notably, that tension between “this is your toy and I’m just borrowing it — I don’t want to break it.” I think that tension is something game text, design, and even you when you speak to me wants us to let go of. Wants us to give up this attachment and grow beyond it.
But when I tip my action figures into the pile with you — when I tip my Superman and my Batman into the pile with your Green Lantern and Aquaman — I still want you to respect that. I don’t want you to pull his arms off.
Sam: Yeah, yeah. The way I feel about it is: I made the toys as the designer. When I dump them in the middle of the table, it’s not like we each brought two toys to the party. It’s like we showed up at the party and there was a pile of 11 toys on the floor.
And hearing you talk about it, there is something really appealing about the fact that one of the reasons we’re playing these games is because we want to be the avatar. We do want to go out there and have ourselves in a different world. That connection is really powerful. But I wonder if the reason that this lack of fidelity is so appealing to me is because it gives you a chance to backtrack if you make the wrong call in your first scene — which character you wanted to pick up. It gives you more room to play, more room to try on something else, even as those bonds are forming.
Over the course of a game of Band-Aids and Bullet Holes, you typically end up with maybe six or seven scenes, where three are led by the Bloodhound, three are led by the Bastard, and one is led by some NPC who’s taken on a big subplot of their own. If I’m playing as the Bloodhound in all the Bloodhound scenes, great — we’re basically playing Fiasco, and that works fine.
But there’s something I like about this: I played Barf in the first scene and it just wasn’t clicking for me — I like Barf’s art but I wasn’t finding it. And then I watch you play Queenie and I’m like, oh, I get that. It turns out she’s had her heart broken and I had my heart broken recently. I see that over there. And maybe you don’t quite know what’s going on with Queenie yet, and the game leaves that door open — for that kind of sorting, that playing around in the early scenes to find out who we’re enjoying playing, and then following that later on.
Because a really common thing is: I’m in a scene playing Barf and I come to Spider, who you’re playing, and Spider was just kind of there on the board because we needed to fill it out a little. But now it’s your turn and you’re like — but I like Spider.
Sidney: Yeah. And like, I could go back to the main plot, but what if I want to stick with Spider? Giving you the choice of: is the right thing to do to follow the main plot, or do I actually want that? Maybe I do want that character monogamy — maybe I do want to see Spider get in on the action. Giving you the opportunity to follow that without requiring you to — I think that’s really fun to watch happen at the table during playtesting.
Sam: Yeah, and that’s a thing that Band of Blades does really well. “I really want to play this character — can you send them on this mission?” “Well, they’re stressed to hell and don’t have the special ability we need.” “Yeah, but I want to play them.” That’s fun and interesting.
Sidney: Good Society also does this really well. It does classic troop play where we each have an Austenian main character — Jane Austen story protagonists with goals like get married, marry into wealth, find true love despite wealth — and then a bunch of connections through the town. The main characters have their goals, but the connections are just problems you can put in the way. They’re the Lockharts of this world.
So you get that beautiful experience of: “Okay, we’re going to do a scene at the ball — I’m going to play this one, who are you playing?” “I haven’t had a go with the Dowager Countess yet, so I’m going to play her.” That motivation to play the character inserts them into the story in an interesting way.
And I think that’s worth capturing here: if you’re designing in this space, if you’re going to give people a choice of what character to play, that decision needs to be meaningful in different ways every time. The best way I can describe it is the counterfactual: if we played D&D 5th edition, except every time we had a long rest we could switch characters — that is not a fundamentally better game. You don’t get a better game just because there’s character switching.
Sam: Yeah. I do wonder — if Band-Aids and Bullet Holes was a game you played for six sessions and I didn’t change the rules at all, I bet people would sort into “I always play Barf, I always play this person.” But I’d also still like the lack of character fidelity because of that initial sorting experience. You play for two hours and feel out who likes who or what’s going on. But especially over long-form campaigns, there’s something comfortable about settling in on who your guys are. Who are your people.
Sidney: Yeah. I think a lot about games like Ars Magica, which does the same troop approach but is designed to be this giant game where your magus is building toward something. The idea of doing all this work for this character and then next week someone else might be controlling them just doesn’t work mechanically.
And even when I look at Band of Blades — a fantastic game, I’ve played it a bunch — it’s a game that could use more support for players playing different characters. They often do it through the mission structure, just saying “grab a blank rookie, make a character you’re interested in,” which is fair. But I’d like to see more: here’s a lens you can bring to this, here’s how the game will help you do this.
Because one thing we haven’t spoken about, Sam — and knowing the kind of people you play with, I don’t think it’s a problem you come up against — but what if I’m the worst player at my table? What if I’m bad at roleplaying games?
What if we’re playing Space Post and everyone else is doing really good Euro Truck Simulator in space things, with surprising mail that has news and gossip and whatever, and I’m just like… I don’t know, I guess I’m a spaceship. Beep boop. What if every time I play a character, everyone at the table is reminded that someone else played them better?
Sam: Is that not a problem even if you have your own character? I playtested this game a bunch at my every-other-week meetup at the local game store, where people come in and play story game one-shots. That scene has a lot of very talented story gamers. It also has some people who are playing RPGs for the first time — often enthusiastic, but as you say, not particularly skilled, uncomfortable, unsure what they’re supposed to be. And my experience playing with those people is: kind of regardless of the game, you either get on board with helping bring that person along, or you don’t. That feels like a social problem to me, not necessarily a mechanical one. Maybe the scene kind of sucks because you don’t know how to roleplay as a spaceship, or you need help, or we offer suggestions — but that’s just being in community with people playing games.
Sidney: Yeah, but a lot of the problems we have at the table are about being in community with people, and we create structures to help support them through that — even down to something as basic as turn-taking.
Sam: Sure. It just doesn’t bother me more than having a single character. I don’t love being in the position of picking on a fictional person, but —
Sidney: Well, the reality is I have felt like that person before, in games where you’re doing the French accent and you know all the lore, and you’re coming up with fake Latin phrases, and I’m just… trying. I’m coming along, but I’m not as interesting, not hitting it as hard. And when you’ve got your own little character, there’s a safe space in that. One: you can’t compare me directly, because no one else has touched this character. And two: I have the opportunity to put up the walls and say, “this is just the way my veteran is.” If I’m not as creative as you, that’s okay — I’m just playing this character the way they would.
Sam: Yeah. This is totally a taste thing — but the other thing I’m thinking about now is something I say whenever I talk about pre-generated characters. I did a whole episode on this with Aaron Lim last year. Last Train to Bremen is a game about a band on a train to hell, and they all hate each other because they’re messy little animals. The pregens are Hound and Mule and Cat and Cockerel. And a thing I really like in that game is: I’ll play as Cockerel, and I’ll see you play as Cat, and I’ll be like, oh, I love what you’re doing with Cat. That looks so fun. I want a chance to play Cat.
I want to do Hamlet. I’m watching Patrick Stewart do Hamlet and I know I’m not going to be Patrick Stewart, but won’t it be fun to get up on stage and try? And even if I end up doing a bad impression of you playing Cat, it’s still fun to pull from what you did last time — I remember it, I want to do that. I’m inspired by it. But that’s totally a taste thing, right?
Sidney: Mm-hmm. I don’t think it’s totally a taste thing, though. I think taste is a big part of it, but not all of it.
I want to go back to something simpler, because I mentioned earlier that I think we’re in an era of what I’d call anthropological design — we’re no longer making rules to set play experiences, we’re looking at what good play experiences are and then making rules that demand them. The great example is the end-of-session XP mechanics we saw in Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark: at the end of the session, if you showed off your vice or engaged with your traumas, take an XP. The intent is mechanical structure to incentivize two different types of play — showing something about your character, and gathering together at the end to talk about our favorite bits.
When I see where the character non-monogamy section is moving at the moment, I see it moving unbound by that desire to pull out specific play experiences. I see it moving toward: “you can all play different characters, or you can choose a character and stick with them — it’s up to you.” I don’t see it being mechanically reinforced. It doesn’t feel like character non-monogamy is functioning as a core element of the fruitful void, where you have these large gravity-bending rules that draw play toward a determined experience. And I wonder: why not? And perhaps more importantly, what cool stuff can come out when someone does that?
Sam: I would argue that Space Post is trying to be a game about low-stakes, chill hangout vibes — the principles are very clear about that. And I do think the character non-monogamy thing is in service of that. It feels like one of the things the game wants to do is make the table feel fair and kind, and part of how the game understands kindness and low stakes is at the player level, not just the character and story level.
If someone was locked into playing the postman or the spaceship, that would create power dynamics. If someone was always the postman, they’d be in every scene. If someone was always the spaceship, they’d only be in every fourth or fifth scene — the travel scenes. But they’d also have a character who gets more depth than the individual colonists receiving letters.
Maybe I’m playing six different colonists and I’m around more in terms of scenes, but you have a character getting more depth. Those are asymmetric in a way that’s fine — I love that kind of game. But I think the non-monogamous distribution of play supports that low-stakesness at the table. The rotating roles mean everyone gets more spotlight, and it’s less likely that weird power dynamics will develop.
And I think this all operates on a really small scale in Space Post. If you’re showing up to play a game about delivering mail in space with Animal Crossing vibes, and you just kind of sit around and hang out for two hours — I think probably you’re kind of expecting that. I don’t think it’s likely to lead to big feuds at the table. But what I love in a game is when every single choice is considered in service of something. And I do think the non-monogamy thing is maybe a big swing because it feels so non-traditional. But if you look at the game in the abstract, I think it’s a small choice in service of that larger goal — and a bunch of other small choices are pointing toward the same thing.
Sidney: Yeah. One of the reasons Space Post was the game we chose to talk about is that I agree: in the same way you can’t just make 5th Edition non-monogamous and get a better game, you can’t just make Space Post have character monogamy and get the same game. It would play very differently. It would be a different experience, and you’d need to change structures around that.
What I’m curious about — even when I look at games like Warhammer Quest, the board game, which says just put all the characters between you and take the one you want to play today — is the people I’ve seen have negative responses to that. Who get attached. Who feel like “I don’t want to touch that, it’s your character,” or “I really wanted to play my character but they’re not available because of the structures in this game right now.”
Sam: Yeah. Much like many things in design — even as you were kind of saying about the '90s tradition of design — the default to that is what I want to challenge. What I want is just to make a game that says: you don’t have to do that. In this game, that’s not the right decision, for a bunch of reasons we’ve talked about. Even if there are costs that come in Band-Aids and Bullet Holes when you’re moving between characters — it’s all trade-offs. What I’m trying to say is: everything is up for design. You can make whatever choices you want, and those choices have consequences. What I want is people considering everything, making every choice intentionally. That’s the word I’m looking for. Intentionality.
Sidney: Yeah. And I think the place I’ve settled — the thing I really wanted to draw out of you, and I’m glad we did — is that this is an act of design rebellion. This is interesting because it’s transgressive. It breaks not only a norm, but an expectation in the players, a way they’re already feeling. It invites some of those negative feelings: “I want that.” But it also invites a bunch of positive feelings.
In design, every choice is about where you put the friction. The position I’ve come to — I came into this not knowing where I was going to stand on character non-monogamy, not knowing how I really felt about it — is one in defense of intentionality, even in the point of transgression. Which is: if you’re going to make a game where you want me to switch characters with people, my two expectations are — one: say it. Don’t say “you can choose to, if you want, maybe trade characters.” You’re a coward and I don’t like your design. I’m staring at Stras and John in Band of Blades.
Sam: Well, that exact line of text is in Band-Aids and Bullet Holes right now, so I’ll really have to rip it out.
Sidney: Do what you want. But rip it out — because it’s going to come down to the second part of the question: what is your game intentionally designed for? If your game is designed to be an avatar-holding experience — where that’s the really interesting part, and you get to develop these characters and wear them like a blanket, with all the comfort and warmth and restriction that implies — then do it. But if the game is better when we don’t do it, make it not do it. Make it work that way. Add the tools and techniques you need — calling cards, maybe lenses, all these different approaches — in order to make a game that plays the way you want it to play.
And I think it is a really fun transgression to hand players over to each other. But like all transgressions — I don’t want to be the ten-year-old writing slurs on the wall of a public bathroom just because it’s transgressive. What I do want to be is the person who writes a play that has some grandiose, earned reason for using a slur at the end of the second act. I want it to be part of the art. I want —
Sam: Transgression to be intentional. Well, I feel like I’ve explained myself here. You’ve also played the game, even if it was a couple of years ago — do you think I succeeded in being intentional with this?
Sidney: I think it is really clear that you did succeed. The best way I can describe it is that I don’t remember who we played. I remember the scenes really clearly — I remember the scene on a local rural suburban street, all of us lined up, the big dramatic shootout with everyone’s calling cards on display. But I can’t tell you who I played. Maybe it was Queenie, maybe it was Lockhart — that experience is about more than just the role I played as a representation of a character.
And I think that’s beautiful. I think Band-Aids and Bullet Holes is a great game. It’s a game that has captured what it means to care about the story rather than the character. You don’t love the Bastard because they’re your character — you love them because they’re the antagonistic force that makes the Bloodhound interesting and dynamic. Such a good game. Where can I back that?
Sam: There’s a link in the show notes, or you can Google “Band-Aids and Bullet Holes Kickstarter.”
Sam: Thanks again to Sid for being here — go back Band-Aids and Bullet Holes on Kickstarter right now, and then follow Sidney on Bluesky at @Sidney@gris or check out the rest of their games at waxwings.com.au. As always, you can find me on Bluesky at @dicexploder and find my games at estinwell.itch.io. Our logo is designed by SporeGree, our theme song is “Sunset Bridge” by Purely Gray, and our ad music is “Lilypans” by Mowboy Travis Tesmer. This episode was edited by Em Acosta. Thanks, and thanks to you for listening.
See you next time. Goodbye.
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